[Frontispiece: It came to the last round. I put down my card. The
Queen of Hearts. Good omen, eh? (Page 21)]
THE GIRLS
AT HIS BILLET
By BERTA RUCK
(MRS. OLIVER ONIONS)
Author of "His Official Fiancee," "In Another
Girl's Shoes," "The Wooing of
Rosamond Fayre," Etc.
WITH FRONTISPIECE
By E. C. CASWELL
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
Published by Arrangement with Dodd, Mead & Company
COPYRIGHT, 1916
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I The Hen-Party
II The "Boy at Last"
III The Incubus in the House
IV The Strange Case of Mr. Curtis
V The New Interest
VI The Disgraceful Party
VII The Lonely Subaltern Again
VIII The Frightful Row
IX Another Shock!
X The Zeppelin Night
XI The Making of a Man-Hater
XII The Anything-But-Joy Ride
XIII The Search for the Bride
XIV Mostly About Relations
XV The Bride Writes Home
XVI Something Quite Unexpected
XVII An Evening of Thrills
XVIII A Day of Despair
XIX Out of Danger
XX I Play Providence
XXI Nancy to the Rescue
XXII Two More Engagements
XXIII The Visit
XXIV A Middle-Aged Romance
XXV Love's New Name
THE GIRLS AT HIS BILLET
CHAPTER I
THE HEN-PARTY
Imagine three really pretty girls like ourselves--and then this hole
of a place that we live in!
Oh, dear! Why on earth did we have parents who disapproved of early
marriages?
They married early enough themselves, goodness knows. Father was
twenty-one, and had only just taken on the big yacht-building
business in this place. Mother was seventeen. A whole year younger
than I am now, if you please. (I am what they called at school "a
precocious eighteen.") Just because I've read a lot, and thought a
good deal about what I've read. But what price Mother's precocity?
which really seemed to be a distinct success. I know she and our
good-looking Dad were awfully fond of each other, and awfully happy
for the ten years of their married life. So why on earth did they
make that absurd stipulation in their will?
That has been at the root of all our troubles!
Why did they say that Aunt Victoria (Mrs. Verdeley) was to take
charge of their three daughters (that's us) "until they arrived at
the age of twenty-five, in order that the said daughters may not
plunge recklessly into the dangers of a too early marriage"?
Since this was what they wished (for Evelyn, Nancy and me to remain
old maids until we are twenty-five) they've certainly done the right
thing in sending us to live here.
Let me try to describe the sweet spot.
Imagine a village, a God-forsaken village on the bleakest part of the
East Coast of England.
Imagine mud flats and wind-swept marshlands, and a sea that crawls
out over miles and miles of shore that looks like nothing on earth
but sheets and sheets of wet brown paper.
Imagine a street or so of small, red-brick houses. Imagine several
boat-building yards, throw in a village green, a post-office, a
church, a few better houses, and a railway station, where the trains
go twice daily as far as "Nowhere," which is the junction to this
place. There you have the delightful part of the world in which we
live!
Its name?--well, perhaps the Censor might not like me to tell you its
name. So I shall call it "Mud Flats," which is certainly descriptive
enough of it.
And now imagine a house that's like a bell without a clapper. In
other words, a house full of women, without any sort of a man at all
about it. Unless you count Penny, our gardener, who walks lame with
rheumatism and who's as deaf as a post, and at least 156 years of
age. Poor dear, he's so old that he thought it would stand in his
way of getting a job _Even Here_, so he always wears (over what I
suppose is a pink Easter-egg of a head) a bushy raven wig that a baby
could see through. He told me it had cost him no end of his savings
to buy. Pathetic, isn't it?
A tragedy of old age, my dears. But no more pathetic than our own,
which is a tragedy of youth!
To go back to it:
Imagine a life where nothing, absolutely nothing ever happens!
Imagine getting up in the morning and looking out of the window at
the brown, flat shore and at the distant sea, with a few
fishing-sails dotted about on it. Imagine dressing for the day in
country clothes that it doesn't matter what they looked like exactly,
considering that nobody ever looked at one, or saw whether one was
plain or pretty, dowdy or smart. Imagine coming down to breakfast,
always the same breakfast--porridge, fish (for Aunt Victoria won't
have bacon in the place), toast, marmalade, and tea. We never have
coffee. It is too much trouble to make for just a household of
women. That's the keynote of our lives!
And now imagine looking round the table and seeing, morning after
morning, the same faces. One old one, that's Aunt Victoria, and two
young ones, my sisters, Evelyn (aged twenty-two) and Nancy, who is
going to be twenty-one next month.
Also, if I craned my neck a little to look into the gilt-framed
mirror over the mantelpiece, I could see a third young face--my own.
Really, I sometimes get as tired of that view as of the view out of
the windows.
Nancy and I often say what a mercy it would be if, one morning, one
could look in the glass and suddenly see a perfectly different face
staring at one! The face of quite another girl: dark instead of
fair, say. (For all of us are sickeningly fair! I get so tired of
it sometimes: tired of the gold and blue and pink and white
colouring.)
Or, better still, if the face of one of us suddenly turned into the
face of a young man with a nice, firm, jutting-out chin, and a
toothbrush moustache! Really, it would be a comfort! Anything for a
change, in fact.
Even a change for the worse! Not that there could be anything worse
than this stage of absolute deadly monotony. For we never catch a
glimpse of the world outside, even though it's no more than a two and
a half hours' journey up to London. Aunt Victoria never lets us go.
Also she is very, very "difficult" about when we get invitations to
stay from girls we were with at school. It would be awful if we went
and actually SAW anything of Modern Life! We can only read in the
papers about what is going on. And isn't that a flavourless way of
getting to know what's on at the theatres, and what sized hats people
are wearing?
Even the war, when it came, seemed to have nothing to do with Mud
Flats. For months and months after everywhere else was seething with
excitement and military, nobody here seemed to think of going to join
the Colours. The few young men in the place seemed only busy
fishing, or whistling about the boat-building yards as usual. No
khaki here--except in the colour of the beastly landscape! No
drilling, no route-marching, no doings of any kind!
As I said to the girls: "I don't believe it would make the slightest
difference to this hole even if the Germans did land: even if the
Kaiser did go into residence at Buckingham Palace and ran that
beastly Spread-eagle of his up in place of the Union Jack! Even that
couldn't make it any more absolutely mouldy than it is now!"
So you see the state of mind we were in up to about a fortnight ago.
And now perhaps you will have some idea of what the inhabitants of
our house (the "Moated Grange" we call it) felt like when the Great
News came to Mud Flats.
* * * * * * * *
When I say the "inhabitants," I mean, of course, we three girls,
Evelyn, Nancy and me. You couldn't expect any feelings in Aunt
Victoria, who is sixty-two, and has a Roman nose, and a figure like a
padded armchair. Unless you count feelings about mud on the carpet,
and scratches on the mahogany, and the wear and tear of the
hearthrug, and her new "_Patience_" that the Doctor's old-maid sister
has just taught her, and so on.
But about the Great News!
I've been chattering on so about other things that I've forgotten to
put that first, as I should. It's this kind of thing that has given
me my nickname of "Rattle." Everybody calls me that who knows me at
all, absolutely ignoring the fact that I have got a most pompous name
of my own, and that I have had my hair up for six weary months (ever
since I came back from school to drag out an existence in this
swamp!). You could only call it a swamp, and an unhabitable one at
that, until the great----
Oh, yes! The Great News!
Well, the great news is this: Mud Flats is to be turned into a camp
of instruction. Soldiers are to come here in batches, with their
officers, and stay for six weeks at a time, undergoing a course of
training in making bridges and pontoons, and blowing up houses, and
all sorts of thrilling things that they'll have to do when they get
out to the front. And when one batch goes another batch will come in
and do it all over again.
The long and short of it is that Mud Flats, this awful spot ten miles
from Nowhere Junction: Mud Flats, this backyard of beyond, where we
live because there are only a few old people and some boat-builders
and other civilians in it--_Mud Flats_ is going to be positively
crammed with men!
"Men, my dears!" said I to the girls. "Do you understand? Real live
young men in trousers (khaki ones, my beloved sisters!) with puttees,
and enormous boots, and pipes, and deep bass voices, and by-Joves,
and swaggering strides and spurs and tobacco-pouches, and all those
things that we've been panting and pining for the merest glimpse of
in this desert!"
"Rattle! I do wish you wouldn't allow your high spirits to run away
with you like this," said Evelyn to me when she heard me giving vent
to those expressions of delight upstairs in the bedroom the day after
we had heard the news. You know Evelyn's the eldest and the prim
one. She thinks she has to set an example, poor long-suffering dear.
She said to me, "Sometimes you become positively vulgar!"
"Vulgar?" I said indignantly. "Why is it vulgar to show I'm
delighted that we are all going to have some sort of a change in our
lives at last? You know you and Nancy are both as glad as I am that
there is now a chance that we shan't have to live the rest of our
lives in this perpetual hen-party of four! Even if the new state of
affairs does only last for a few months, we shall have had some fun!
We shall have had some youth and tobacco-smoke about the place at
last!"
Nancy's face went all quivery in her attempt not to let it crumple up
into smiles. She has the prettiest face of the lot of us, I think.
And we all three are as decent-looking as they make them, though I
say it, in our large, blond, Greek-goddessy style. I never did hold
with mock modesty, and considering that all nice girls are in duty
bound to consider themselves frights, which is what seemed to be the
fashion in Aunt Victoria's time. Why should it be correct for a girl
not to realise that her skin is white-velvety, and her eyes like
corn-cockles with dew on them, and her hair like yellow silk and
masses of it?
She would be expected to notice those things quickly enough if they
were on another girl, wouldn't she? In fact, she would be looked
upon as stupid and unobservant if she didn't.
And if I pretended I didn't it would be merely insincerity, and
insincerity is a thing I don't hold with. I told Evelyn so. I am
afraid she is just a little inclined to be given to it. I suppose
she thinks it's always an eldest sister's duty to look shocked at
what the two younger ones say.
"It isn't as if it need make any difference at all to us, even if the
village is full of soldiers," Evelyn went on, pouring cold water over
my glee. "We shan't get to know any of them, just a houseful of
women like ourselves."
"Shan't we!" said Nancy, from the glass where she was trying on her
last Spring's hat, which she had retrimmed with a quite smart and
rather military-looking "pom-pom." "Shan't we, indeed? Now I will
burst upon you another bit of news that I have just heard at the
post-office. These men and their officers that are going to
come--where do you suppose they are going to live? There aren't any
barracks for them: there aren't any tents. And they are not going to
be in huts either. No," she finished impressively. "They are going
to put them all into billets."
You know, until this war, we were all so benighted that I don't think
any of us would have known what a "billet" was. Perhaps we should
have imagined that it was a piece of wood. So it is, in the
dictionary.
But now, of course, we realised exactly what was meant. It meant
that every house in the place would be expected to put up some of
these soldiers, to have them to board with them.
"And we shall have some one, see if we don't!" I said exultantly.
"This Grange is one of the biggest houses in the place, in fact the
biggest next to the Admiral's and the Rectory and the Doctor's.
There's the quite big spare room where nobody ever sleeps. The
drawing-room makes quite a good sitting-room, and there is the girls'
Lair that's simply crying out to be made into a man's smoking-room,
and----"
"And you may as well wake up from these rosy dreams at once," said
Evelyn, quenchingly, "because there is at least one very good reason
why we shan't have any soldiery billeted here with us."
"Why?" I asked quite blankly, and Nancy turned from the glass.
Her hands were still held up to the reorganised hat, which any one
could see she had been imagining herself fascinating the New Army
with! And she echoed, "Why on earth not?"
"Because," said Evelyn, "we are not forced to take any men if we
object. We can refuse. The Authorities allow that, if there are
only women in the house, as there are here in the Moated Grange. You
can be pretty certain that Aunt Victoria won't want to have any great
men with pipes trampling in huge Army boots all over her
well-preserved stair-carpets: now, will she?"
I felt my face fall a yard. No, it was not at all likely that Aunt
Victoria would agree to take men into her precious house! Why, it
was all the lawyers could do to persuade her to take Nancy, Evelyn
and me when Father and Mother both died together of German measles.
You see, Aunt Victoria is one of the most hopeless types of old
maids. Namely, the old maid who has got married to another old maid,
and who has added a lot of the "he-old maids'" fads to her own, and
who has then become a widow with the last state worse than the first!
"Wild horses," said Evelyn, "will not make Aunt Victoria say they can
billet even one of the Camp of Instruction officers here."
"Wild horses isn't a very good way of getting any one to do
anything," I said, picking up heart again. "There is a much better
way of getting a person like Aunt Victoria to do what you want."
And for ages I wouldn't tell them what I meant. However, to save
time, I will tell you now. It is to go on exactly the opposite tack
and to make her think that you don't want what you do want. For
instance, the whole of lunch-time to-day my conversation has been
this sort of thing:
"Oh, Aunt Victoria, isn't it awful to think that almost everybody in
this village will have to have soldiers foisted on them soon! Fancy
having a strange man in the house whether you wanted to or not.
Fancy having to have him to meals, and tramping all up and down your
passages! I do think it is an imposition!"
For I knew that was what she had been thinking herself. As usual,
she turned slick round.
"Dear me, Elizabeth! What did you say? An imposition, indeed!" she
repeated, looking at me most severely over the top of her
lady-mayoressy-looking black satin blouse. "A great many people
would consider it an honour to be able to do so much for their
country, let me tell you. Personally, I think that any Englishwoman
worthy of the name should be glad to do what she can for the comfort
of these noble fellows. Remember that but for what they do for us we
should have no homes to-day, no roofs over our heads, certainly no
carpets under our feet! Remember Belgium!"
With much more in the same strain.
I listened, inwardly shrieking with delight, and stamped hard on
Nancy's toes under the table at the same time.
Of course, I truly agreed with every single word that Aunt Victoria
was saying! Of course, all that about what every Englishwoman should
feel was exactly what Nancy and Evelyn and I do feel about soldiers,
only more so!
However, it wouldn't have been the least use letting Aunt Victoria
know that, not it! The "contrary" old thing would immediately "have
taken the offensive," as it says in the newspapers, and would have
said: "A great deal too much fuss is being made over these soldiers
nowadays. After all, they are only doing their duty! They are only
doing what they are paid to do by ratepayers like ourselves. I do
not see why we should have the added burden of housing and feeding
the creatures!"
So I went on sowing the good seed by saying:
"Well, I suppose that's how one ought to feel! But I am rather glad
that the doctor and the admiral will have the bother of the officers,
and that the Higginses and the Eltons and all the people in the
little houses round about will have the men foisted on them, and
chalk-marks of their regiments and companies all over _their_ doors!
Anyhow, we shall be left in peace and quiet without a single soldier
or officer or anything in our house!"
"And why should you be so sure of that, Elizabeth?" my Aunt Victoria
boomed out at me in her stateliest contralto tones. "How do you know
that we shall not be asked to harbour some of these brave men?"
I put down my spoon and looked at her in a mildly docile, puzzled
sort of way, after having exchanged a glance with Nancy, who was only
keeping herself from open giggles by counting the damson stones on
her plate.
"Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor!" She counted up to "soldier"
again, and then I said to Aunt Victoria: "But, Auntie, you know we
won't be expected to put anybody up, as you are a widow-lady living
alone with three single nieces in the house. You will be allowed to
refuse."
"Refuse! I hope I should not dream of doing anything so
unpatriotic!" said Auntie fussily, while I no longer dared meet
Nancy's eye. "If any soldiers are suggested to me as visitors to the
Grange, I can only say that they will be made welcome to the limit of
my modest means!"
So that settled that.
This afternoon the whole thing was fixed up.
An officer came round to arrange about billets for the first draft.
We, of course, were absolutely thrilled when we heard his ring at the
bell. He gave his name in to Beeton, our housemaid, as "Major
Lawless." A lovely name, I thought!
And though he said he wished to interview Mrs. Verdeley, meaning Aunt
Victoria, I did manage to be coming through the hall when he passed,
and to be looking for something in the drawing-room when he was
there. I was aching for the first sight of khaki! Anyhow, I
contrived to get in a good hard look at the gallant major. I hoped
he'd be like the one in "Jones of the Lancers," "_When I'm booted,
and trousered, and spurred_--MY WORD!"
And I can only tell you that he was absolutely disappointing. To
begin with, he was as old as the hills, and I should think he'd
learnt his drill before the Flood, or, at any rate, just at the
Flood. Embarkation officer, perhaps. Putting the animals through
it, you know: this sort of thing: "Beasts of the field--form _fours_!
Form four feet! ... Birds of the air--two flights to the Ark,
forward--FLAP!" and so on.
He couldn't have been a day under forty, and not at all the sort of
figure that you always imagine a soldier must have: smart and well
set-up, and broad-chested and flat-backed.
Oh, no! He was quite round-shouldered, as if he were more accustomed
to sitting in an office and bending over desks than doing any real
military work! And he was pale. He wore such a worried look, too,
as if he had the cares of a whole campaign on his narrow shoulders!
The voice in which he talked was so resigned and melancholy.
I heard him say to Aunt Victoria: "Thank you, very much.... Most
kind of you, I am sure.... Then the young man will be turning up
here about tea-time on Thursday."
Armed with this glad tidings, I scuttled back to the other girls in
the Lair, behind the dining-room.
The Lair is quite the nicest room in the house. It is very
"girly-girly," but almost as comfortable as if it belonged to men.
You know, I always imagine men, as a rule, have things cosier than we
have.
The lazy-chairs are very old and very shabby, but they are springy
and comfortable still. The broad window-seat is well padded with
turkey-red covered cushions, and there is a big curtain of the same
stuff to draw and hide the view when it rains, and the mud flats and
the lead-paper sea and the weeping grey skies get altogether too
depressing.
There is a cottage piano, with a stack of ancient songs about "_The
Gipsy's Warning_" and "_In the Gloaming, O My Darling_," and that
type of thing, as well as our own slightly more modern ditties, and a
whole pile of stamp-papered and thumbed dance music--the only chance
we ever get of hearing any dance music down here. Woe is me!
Then, in the corner there is a red calico-covered wirework shape for
us to make our blouses on. There are our three work-baskets, all
rather chaotic, I am afraid, and Evelyn's everlasting knitting. On
the walls there are bookshelves, quite full of all sorts of books--my
old school histories and geographies, and a long red row of
sevenpennies, and the blue Service Kiplings which we clubbed together
to buy last summer. The top shelf has got all old novels from
mother's and grandmamma's day; also poetry: Keats and Shelley and
Byron and Scott. That's how it is I come to be so awfully well-read.
On the walls we have got a queer mixture of pictures, just the ones
we like. There is Maurice Greiffenhagen's young shepherd kissing the
girl among the poppies: which always comforts Nancy and me to look
at, because the girl has such a very big foot, bigger even than ours,
and we take sixes! Then there's a tear-off calendar with a picture
of Romeo and Juliet, and a quotation for every day in the year.
Then there is a big photograph of the statue of the Venus de Milo,
who is such a duck, we think: so good-natured-looking! Rather like
my face, I think. And, last of all, there is a framed coloured
supplement from the _Graphic_ of the year One, which I do so love.
Do you know it? It is a picture of about six girl sisters, all
dressed alike, in navy-blue jerseys and kilted skirts with crimson
sashes and their hairs down, crowded round a nurse who has got a
long-clothes new baby in her arms. She is showing it to the family.
And the title of the picture is, "Mamma's Christmas Present: A Boy at
Last."
Isn't it appropriate to us in this house? Better days are in store!
I feel it in my bones! I skipped into the Lair, where Nancy was busy
over a new camisole which she was making out of a summer muslin
skirt. Evelyn was sitting by the table, knit, knit, knit.
"'A Boy at Last!'" I quoted the title of the picture to them.
"Girls, the major says the young man is to arrive on Thursday next,
at tea-time. The question is," I concluded impressively, "THE
question is, which of us is he going to fall in love with?"
"My dear Rattle," gasped Evelyn in a really scandalised voice this
time. Even Nancy, who generally doesn't mind, murmured, "Really,
Rattle, you are too perfectly disgraceful sometimes."
"Why?" I asked, sitting on the table and swinging my feet. "Why
shouldn't I mention things that everybody knows are very likely to
happen? Have you read all the short stories that they are putting
nowadays in magazines about the young soldier who always falls in
love with the girls at his billet?"
"All of the girls?" asked Nancy, twinkling over the camisole again.
"Oh, well, one of them. You know what I mean. There is always a
romance, an engagement, and a war wedding at the end."
"But that's in magazine stories, you absurd child," said Evelyn
again, trying not to laugh. "That's not in real life."
"Real life is so much more like magazine stories than it used to be
before the war," I declared. "I am sure there is much more romance
all over the place. As for the war weddings, you can't say that's
all fiction. You can see photographs of them in the _Daily Mirror_
and the _Daily Sketch_ every morning of your lives. I think it would
be perfectly lovely to have one from this house, between one of us
and the young officer who's coming here to be billeted! Yes, and
never mind the bothering old will about not rushing into early
marriages!"
"Rattle, you really are awful!" the two girls said together this
time, and again I said: "I am not awful, I am only frank. I only say
out in a quite unabashed voice what you know other people are
thinking all the time. It is not that I am worse than other people!
It's only that I am much more honest."
"It is that you are such a child that you don't really know what you
are talking about," Evelyn went on superiorly. "You're only a
flapper, after all."
"Flappers are 'in' just now, according to the papers. So he might
like me better than any of you in the long run," I said. "Wait and
see!" And I hummed the old song, "_Maybe the lad will fancy me, and
disappoint you all!_"
"He may not 'fancy' any of us," said Nancy, sewing away busily at her
camisole. "He may be so busy with his classes and his
bridge-building and signalling. He won't have a look or a thought
for the girls at his billet."
A thought struck me suddenly.
"Let's tell fortunes about it," I suggested, "and see what really is
going to happen according to the cards."
And I opened the table-drawer, and brought out the rather cockley
pack of cards that we had learnt to play "Beggar My Neighbour" with
about five weary years ago, when we all were recovering from
whooping-cough, and couldn't go out.
"Let's see," I said, "which of us is what poetry books call the
'destined maid.' And then, which ever comes out the one the young
soldier is to have, well!--the other two can just take a back seat
and allow her a fair field."
"Rattle, what absolute nonsense," said Evelyn severely. "What bosh!
As if anybody believed anything of that sort----"
"We needn't believe it," I said. "It won't 'mean' anything. But it
will be just something to pass away the time with before the tea-bell
rings. It's a most loathsome afternoon, so we may as well have
something to amuse ourselves." For the rain dashed heavily against
the windows outside. The melancholy view was the limit. I drew the
red curtain. Nancy stirred up the fire, and even Evelyn (pretending
she wasn't going to) put down her book, and drew nearer to the table
where I was shuffling the cards. And murmuring to myself a poem that
I'd just finished. You know, I write verses sometimes. I'll tell
you these ones. I call them "Fate." They're about engagements.
"_Never chortle when you hear--
That your school-friend's troth is plighted
To a man with spectacles
Or a man the King has knighted.
If he stutters in his speech,
If his years are more than forty,
Even if his head is bald
Do not laugh at her; it's naughty.
Fate has probably reserved
Something worse in store for you!
How would you like a----_"
"Oh, come on, Rattle: those are shuffled now!"
"All right. You cut, Nancy," I said, handing the pack to her. She
cut, and Evelyn dealt. "Now! It's for the one who is left with the
highest card in her hand," I said.
We played out the cards on the old ink-spattered table, laughing and
chattering together. For it's all very well to say how dull this
place has been, and what a howling wilderness Mud Flats, is, and what
a hole of a place the Moated Grange: but we have had quite a lot of
fun among ourselves. We three have always got on well together.
Nothing can spoil that.
It came to the last round. I put down my card.
The Queen of Hearts. Good omen, eh?
Nancy threw down the Two of Diamonds.
The Nine of Spades was Evelyn's.
"Aha! you see," I said triumphantly, "I take this trick. Young
Lieutenant Whatever-his-name-is will be the fate of the flapper!"
"We ought to try it three times," said Nancy. So again we gathered
up the cards and cut and dealt.
I saw the faces of the other two girls growing quite excited over the
game, utter nonsense as it was.
This time Nancy had the King of Diamonds, I had the Two of Spades,
and Evelyn the Ace. Eldest first, in fact.
"Now again," said Nancy. "Why d'you laugh, Rattle?"
"I'm thinking," I said, "of 'our' possible fiancé."
I wondered what that unconscious young officer, now at his depot,
would have thought if he could have taken a little peep at the scene
in the country house which was to be his billet.
I wondered if he would have been amused at the picture. The cosy,
untidy, red-curtained room, with the trio of pretty girls, all tall,
all fair, gathered about the table with their three golden heads bent
eagerly above their absurd game. If he could have guessed that the
game was supposed to decide which of the players was to become his
"destined maid"! Ha! If they all guessed about this sort of thing,
what would happen?
There was silence, this last round.
Silence broken only by the little "talking" noise of the flames in
our old-fashioned fire-grate, and by the rustling sound of the cards
as they flew one above the other just as the autumn leaves outside
were dropping from the big sycamore on to the path.
The last card fell.
This time the score stood thus:
Nancy, King of Clubs.
The vulgar Rattle, Three of Diamonds.
The lady-like Evelyn, Five of Hearts.
"Ah, now each of us have come out top once," said I. "How is that
supposed to count?"
"Why, that we've all got an even Fate, I suppose," suggested Evelyn,
sweeping up the cards and tossing them into the table-drawer again.
"Probably that the young man who's coming to be billeted here won't
have anything to say to one of us."
"Always look on the bright side," laughed Nancy. "But I believe that
the first round was meant to count. Rattle, Queen of Hearts. Child,
your elder sisters will retire into the background like Cinderella
the other way round, and give you, as you say, a fair field with the
young man."
"Thanks, awfully. I would do the same for you, any time," I said
gratefully.
And then we all three burst out into shrieks of laughter over our own
seriousness about what was only fun.
Now we've got a week to wait and see what the young man's going to
turn out like.
Nancy, who is rather sentimental, though she tries to hide it by
pretending she's talking bosh--Nancy calls him "the possible Prince
Charming."
His real name, according to a quite solemn and ceremonious little
note that he's written to Aunt Victoria, is Frank Lascelles.
Auntie says "Lascelles" is what she calls a "good" name, but Nancy
says never mind, there are all sorts of ramifications of even the
goodest families, so that he need not be one of the very high and
mighty ones at all. Auntie says they are always called "Frank" for
some reason.
"Frank" is nice.
I wonder whether he is?
* * * * * * * *
(Later.) No! he isn't!
He's come--has this young---- Well, I haven't thought of anything
bad enough to call him yet, this young officer that we've got to put
up with at the Moated Grange for six mortal weeks.
Oh, how am I going to stand it?
It'll be perfectly ghastly.
However, perhaps I'd better begin again at the story of that awful
day when he arrived.